PJ66 is the best one at a little under 60,000 km range. 68 is a little better than 65 at 95,000 km. None are very good.

This was a good time to have my nose rubbed in the fact that Amalthea is very dark and red compared to the Galileans.

And the phase angle was pretty unfavorable this time also. There are at least somewhat closer approaches later (PJ66 is the next one.)

The first part of the PJ63 imaging, including an underwhelming image of Amalthea, has been posted to missionjuno.

If you can find Amalthea without knowing where it is, you are better at it than I am. Hint: sample 593, line 4878 in image 13.

Having worked on several unsuccessful Europa proposals over the past quarter-century, one of the few parts it seemed we didn't have to worry about were MOSFETs, so this is pretty dismaying.

I think the problems were detected in ground testing. There is a system for parts problems to be reported to the wider community ( https://gidep.org/home ) but I can't share any information from there or from other sources.

You can learn more about the parts in question at https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/hig...-hard-mosfets/#

I don't think they have been released yet, https://planetarydata.jpl.nasa.gov/img/data...RU_EDR/JUPITER/ only goes through orbit 56.

I wouldn't draw a lot of conclusions from the Juno experience, since the radiation environment Clipper sees is modeled to be a lot worse.

Not clear how much that is, though, since the mission has lasted far longer and done more monoprop maneuvers than ever intended.

The status update at the last OPAG said "end of mission likely defined by propellant or radiation" and indicated that the project was considering an additional 11 orbits, out to PJ87.

There's no EDAC on the DRAM, so it's always been subject to bit flips, although the images are typically resident for a couple of minutes.

Hopefully this is just a sign of increased particle flux and not some kind of developing problem in the electronics.

If you believe the simplified diagram in https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/28105 then all the hydrazine fuel is available to the monoprop thrusters.

Good catch, I hadn't noticed them.

These could easily be bit flips in the DRAM that stores the images temporarily before they are sent to the spacecraft. I'm a little surprised these haven't shown up before, but I haven't really been looking.

No bad checksums or anything in this image, so the error has to be upstream of all that processing.

Thanks, Ralph. To put it slightly differently, unlike the near-field navigation on the Mars rovers, there's no need for stereo to navigate Dragonfly in flight (at least, not two-camera stereo.) Read the navigation paper linked upthread for details.

AFAIK, there are no plans to run both Navcams at the same time.

As for size, compare our P50 camera https://www.msss.com/files/ECAM-P50_N50.pdf with the LCAM and you can probably guess what's going on.

For additional kremlinology, you can try to guess the FOVs of the cameras from the sizes of the external housings in the side view.

"PRELIMINARY DESIGN OF THE DRAGONFLY NAVIGATION FILTER" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.13513v2 has a lot of detail about how navigation works, but it doesn't give the FOV of the Navcam explicitly. FWIW, LCAM on M2020 had an FOV of 90x113 degrees per https://www.msss.com/files/LCAM.pdf and that file also lists some other FOV options for our standard lenses.

Since we're building all the cameras on Dragonfly, then yes, I do know the answer. But can I say? Probably not.

You can sort of guess by looking for things that look like cameras in those slides. And there's a slide that has labels "forward science cameras" and "side science cameras" and "downward science cameras" -- maybe that answers the question.

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Hum...design_maturity



Somewhat tone-deaf release from ESA considering the whole mission is in real jeopardy of being scrapped or massively retooled, but I guess it's all they can do at this point.

This just looks like stray light to me; note the curves in the red channel that look like reflections of the bright limb. We take these images because there's nothing else to do given the current image geometry, and while we call them "aurora search" it's not with much expectation that Junocam could see an aurora if there was one.

Data posted to missionjuno.

Spoiler: bright plume visible on Io.

Here's a link to a paper about one of the tiny parts of MSR we were (are?) involved with: https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4310/11/6/456

I could speculate about the study selections and what they mean, but it's simpler to wait and see what happens. It's fair to say that the selection of SpaceX has caused great excitement in some quarters, for reasons I don't fully grasp.

It will, when it becomes operational, assuming it meets its original performance goals.

I don't find the Boeing proposal very credible for a whole lot of reasons, but SLS has at least already flown.

According to https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/MARS2020...KSCET.00009.tsc the clock has been a little fast relative to UTC over most of the mission (if I have the sense of the correction right).

It would be tough to figure out exactly which images correspond most closely to the end of a drive.

I'm not sure why the JSON file has the problems you describe. If I were going to do this, I would look at https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/MARS2020...f_rover_loc.bsp which contains 52 site coordinates, but I've always been a little unsure how sites correlate to drives. I think short drives don't change the site?

I would have said that Phobos sample return was clearly "Category V unrestricted" and thus nothing special had to be done, but apparently there is some question about that, at least according to https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/2...e-martian-moons -- though they ultimately agreed with the unrestricted categorization.

Semi-serious proposals have been made for Earth-orbiting labs to quarantine and examine returned samples. https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/deepspace2018/pdf/3189.pdf is a recent example that references the early-80s Antaeus Report https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19820012351

This concept sort of showed up in the (unwatchable IMHO) movie LIFE ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_(2017_film) )

Of course, these would all be staggeringly expensive.

I suspect Zubrin is right and planetary protection from Mars is probably not needed. But it's one of those low-probability/high-consequence things that few people would be willing to risk if it was up to them. And Michael Crichton just did too darn good a job when he wrote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain

No, I don't think this helps. Getting into Earth orbit is either risky (aerocapture) or very expensive in terms of delta V. Unless there is some exotic propulsion system or some complex chaotic trajectory. And once you had it in Earth orbit, then what?

His ISRU solution handwaves the difficulty and complexity of making and storing the propellant, but at least it has slightly better mass margins.

https://spacenews.com/practical-approach-ma...return-mission/

Worth a read, but I'm skeptical of Zubrin's 50-kg total mass Earth return vehicle. And even if the delta V numbers work out in the abstract, he presupposes all the planetary protection requirements can be made to go away.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20160008162 is an old paper that describes an earlier tour design. I couldn't find anything more recent that wasn't paywalled.

At one point the claim was made that there would be no science observations made of the other satellites to save costs, but I doubt that will hold once they're flying.

Remember that M2020 started out as MAX-C, for which the whole point was caching, it wasn't "added."

But caching goes much farther back, there was a serious proposal to add caching to MSL. See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/22...aching_missions from 2010 for example.

Caching on M2020 always seemed to me like a fairly transparent ploy to get a foot in the door by collecting samples, which would then motivate their return via (in part) the sunk-cost fallacy. (Someone less cynical would just view it as a sensible partitioning of an incremental approach.)